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Saturday, January 3, 2015

Love in Bloom

By Paul Kupperberg

There’s nothing quite like the moment when contributors
copies of the hot off the press newest project you’ve worked on arrive at your door.
The box or package is opened and out spill copies of the work, all brand new
and shiny. Often, this is the first time I’ve seen the finished story or book.
Just the other day, the surprise in the package were copies of Archie Loves Betty and Veronica Mad Libs,
a project I wrote over a year ago. And just as good as finally getting to see
the finished piece was the fact that the book carries my byline. Mad Libs do not, as a rule, run writer’s
credit. Instead, the cover and title page usually just read “Concept created by
Roger Price & Leonard Stern,” but at the insistence of the licensor, my
pals and gals at Archie Comics, I was given the rare Mad Libs title page byline.

Not that my name hasn’t been on enough publications that one
more or less was going to make a difference. It’s appeared in plenty of credit
boxes, book and comic book covers, tables of content, title pages, and in
footnotes and endnotes of comics history and reference books.

Anyway, a couple of days after the arrival of the Mad Libs, Mort Todd sent me a PDF of the
first issue of an upcoming Neo title for proofreading that elevated my name to
a place it had never been. That I never expected it to wind up. Not just above
the title...but actually a part of
the title. As in Paul Kupperberg’s Secret
Romances. Like “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” or “Stan Lee Presents”...only,
you know, not.

While it’s definitely a massage to the ego having your name
in the title, it’s also a little embarrassing. And, in the case of Paul Kupperberg’s Secret Romances, not my idea. My working title for the project
had been Postmodern Love Stories,
which was how I pitched it--beginning in 2011, pre-Charlton Neo--to whatever
comic book publishers I could reach out to. Those that bothered to respond
praised the material but passed on the book because, as they all said, “romance
comics don’t sell.” Of course they don’t; you can’t sell what isn’t being
published.

But logic being what it is to those who have already made up
their minds, Postmodern Love Stories made
the rounds, after which it kind of just lay there, not forgotten but going
nowhere. Until mid-2014, when it suddenly became apparent to me that I finally
had access to an editor who might be open to my proposal: me!

Well, Charlton Neo, to be exact. I pitched Postmodern Love, Neo said yes, and my
orphaned project finally had a home. The ideal
home. The original Charlton Comics had been a prolific publisher of romance titles
and, like the other genres that modern mainstream comics has seen fit to ignore
in favor of all-superheroes, all the time, Charlton Neo believes in comics
without capes to add flavor to the otherwise homogenous stew of bulging biceps
and colorful costumes.

It was Mort’s idea that we change the title to connect the
comic to its Classic Charlton roots. I ran the list of Charlton romance titles
and Secret Romance seemed to be the best
fit. Mort also thought it would be a good idea to add my name to the title, purely,
as I recall, as a marketing move. We were having these discussions mid-year,
during the height of the media attention I was receiving for having written “The
Death of Archie,” so exploiting my name seemed to make sense at the time, I
suppose. Whatever...it got me a comic book with my name in the title.

And, no, the title doesn’t
mean that these are tales of my own romances, secret or otherwise (well, with
the exception of an incident that ended up being used as a springboard for one
of the stories), just good old fashioned love stories with a nod towards 21st
century realities. And snark. A lot of snark. I mean, have you met me?!

It’s not out of line, nor without some poetic symmetry, to
say that getting Secret Romances to
publication has been a labor of love, and wouldn’t have been possible without
the aid and abetment of a whole lot of talented and generous people, beginning
with artists Pat and Tim Kennedy, who penciled three stories for the proposal,
and scrivenerextraordinaire Jack
Morelli who lettered two of the above. But I’ll go into more depth on the
ladies and gentlemen who brought my scripts to reality in the next go-round on
this here blog.